"All right, Adachi-san, you shall be the guide."
She was radiant. "Kent-san, you are so good. I want you to be pleased, and I feel that you are not pleased, but I want you to know us too, me and my friends, and to like us, if you can."
They passed down the broad stone steps into a vast space of clanging street cars and jostling crowds. Then down a side street, a few blocks. She pointed to a sign, a gaudy female, presumably symbolically representing art or some such abstraction, holding in one hand a palm leaf and in the other a paintbrush. Over it was the inscription, in kata-kana characters, "kafue montomarutoru"; of course, that meant "café Montmartre."
He knew scores of the queer new cafés of Tokyo, but this one was of a type new to him. There were the same rickety tables and chairs, but crowding the walls, leaving scarcely an inch of clear space, were vast oil paintings, tremendous stretches of canvas, all depicting nudes, in every possible position and surrounding, in bath houses and by mountain pools, posing in front of mirrors or just standing upright vacantly, without apparent intention at all; huge figures, clumsy, ill-formed, a mass of light-brown or pink, indelicate flesh pervading and dominating the entire room.
The tables were crowded, the long-haired, bespectacled ones had evidently here a habitat, a homely Parnassus, where they might worship that which they conceived to be art, amidst an atmosphere of beer, bad cooking and the eternal nudes. They found seats at a table with some of them, who smiled and made room with great politeness.
It was an odd mess. Still, since he was definitely in for it, he might as well do his best to draw from the incident whatever he might. But he could not get over the incongruity of it, Adachi-san, dainty, modest, with only an inch or two of clear ivory-tint below the throat showing under the embroidered eri neckband, surrounded by this mob-like throng of utter nakedness.
"And do you really like all that?" He swept his hand disparagingly towards the walls.
"Ssst," she placed her hand warningly on her lips. "Please don't talk so loud, Kent-san. He made them, the proprietor over there. He runs the restaurant for a living, but he paints, too, these things."
Were they all going crazy; even second-class restaurateurs snatching moments between steaks and chops to worship fanatically at the new shrines? He was about to speak, to express to her his wonder at these ever more astounding revelations, when he became aware that some one had come up to them, a Japanese of about thirty, less conspicuously bohemian than the others, still apparently one of the artist tribe. He bowed with quiet dignity to Kent. "I beg your pardon, but I couldn't help overhearing, and I should like very much to know what you think." He turned to the girl. "Please, Adachi-san, won't you introduce me to your friend."